It's not the local part-time community salaries that need to go, it's the communities themselves

Everyone seems to be feeling tighter than a drum lately ( I know I am), so I'll bet yesterday's Journal story about the pay for part-time officials has many ready to light the torches and sharpen the pitchforks.

People love to get something for nothing, and in this case the grumbling I"m hearing is that people should serve townships and villages for free.

Which, I'm sorry, is just silly. In most cases. (In others ...) I've interviewed and known many part- and full-time village and township officials over the years. Most work hard. Very hard.

I know that's not a popular sentiment. People love to assume that anyone who is paid on their dime is a shiftless bum. But it isn't true.

The hue and cry here shouldn't be about part-time salaries, it should be how many of them taxpayers are paying. Michigan, in many ways, is like Flint.

Flint used to be a contendah. A big city. The big cheese. And its government, schools and city services -- and the number of jobs and the salaries it paid -- reflected it.

As Flint shrank, little of that went away, and if it did, it did so grudgingly, like belly fat. The result now, 30 years after Flint peaked: Way too much government for way too small a city. To go back to my fat analogy, to look at Flint government now is to see a once buff guy gone to seed, with a big, fat gut around the middle.

That same phenomenon is going on all over Michigan. With the mass exodus of people and jobs from the state, local governments that once were needed, now are not. Jobs that needed to be done, no longer need to be done.

In many cases, we need fewer townships, villages and school districts. That's where you'd save money -- by combining all the little kingdoms out there.

I'll give you a for instance from where I live. Two years ago, there was a ballot initiative to combine Grand Blanc city and Grand Blanc Township into one. It made utter sense from a community view (if you live in the township, as I do, you think of yourself as a Grand Blancer, not a Grand Blanc Townshipper) and an economic perspective. Combining services would have saved taxpayers plenty and turned Grand Blanc into one of the areas's largest cities.

Voters rejected the measure, in large part, I believe, because some of the elected and appointed officials in the city and the township put pride -- and their own wallets -- ahead of the community good and lead the charge against consolidation.

Two years later, it seems like utter silliness. Here we sit with a dwindling tax base paying people in both communities to do similar work when we had a perfectly good chance to change and be ready for the future instead of reacting to it.

If you wanna get mad about something, that's what you should be getting mad about.